Whether you’re just starting out, or have been blogging for a few years already, there are three crucial things you absolutely must have in order to become successful.
That’s not to say you can’t gain website visitors and subscribers without these three elements, but if you want a full-time income from blogging, they’re necessary.
Before we get into the list, let’s discuss the critical component of blogging consistency.
Many bloggers start out strong, but find themselves tired and frustrated after a month. Staring at your website traffic stats and not seeing any improvement can be heart-wrenching and defeating. Keep in mind that blogs take time. If you believe you can start blogging and begin earning a full-time income in two or three months – this isn’t for you. Blogging doesn’t work that way!
To create a successful blog is no different from creating a successful business. In truth, it’s identical because your blog is your business. You are the brand behind the business. You are the visibility and for success, you need to stay consistent. Keep posting to your blog. Keep sharing across all social platforms. Keep learning SEO. Just keep at it and it will grow!
Now, let’s get into the three critical components of any successful blog.
Content That Serves A Purpose
This is the first requirement of a successful blog, but it’s not directed only at your audience. Your content must also serve a purpose for you. Meaning, you need to find it engaging, interesting, and sustainable. As I said above, blogs take time to catch on and followings are built slowly but steadily. If your blog is about digital photography, but you don’t care much about the subject, stop doing it and switch to something you care about.
Blogging has evolved! A decade and a half ago, you could blog about your day and general interests and random occurrences and people would read it. Not anymore. Social media platforms has taken over that role. Now we chat about our sporadic interests and share recipes, personal photos, and so on across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter.
Let me repeat my original point – blogging has evolved.
Now, a successful blog requires long-form content that is informative, engaging, not self-centered, and most of all, useful.
If your blog is about you, where’s the purpose to your readers? What’s in it for them? Why would they devour content that doesn’t provide any personal value?
If you want to focus entirely on what you like and want to write about, that’s called journaling, and no one wants to read diary blogs anymore.
To make your blog your success, you must:
- Narrow down on your audience’s needs, and deliver content that is helpful at addressing those struggles and answering their questions. Don’t just guess at these! It’s too important that you get it right, so do some audience and keyword research.
- Create content that sells. This can include good copywriting and topic selection to promote your own products, affiliate products or sell yourself as an expert in your niche.
- Get to 100 high-quality articles as soon as possible. Quantity matters as well, especially when it comes to SEO. Google loves websites that are clusters of content around specific interests. So be consistent. But don’t view 100 articles as your goal – that’s the start. Reach that and keep pumping out high-quality, long-form content on a regular basis.
Create A Valuable Paid Offer
Any successful full-time blogger will tell you that running a profitable blog goes beyond the content you publish there. It’s reliant on how you’re planning to monetize it. Think of it this way, you’ve put in the work and built the content, you have website visitors, you’re using an advertising program to generate some passive cashflow off that traffic, but now what?
You’re leaving money and brand-building opportunities on the floor!
The best way to fully monetize a blog is to create a paid offer. After all, you have the traffic, so why not capture some of it and direct them to your own product or service and explode your revenue.
This can be anything from a $7 printable, $17 eBook, a $49 training, a $197 course, a $450 service or anything in between.
The goal is to generate a money-making offer that is in line with your topic of expertise.
Before you assume that you should hold off on this step until you’ve built up your audience, let me put an end to that thinking. You need to create these offers early on in your blogging process. This will give you time to tweak and improve them as your audience grows. Selling online is a learning curve, and it takes time to get it right. Once you do, you’ll be printing money on a monthly basis!
So start small, but start no matter what!
Focus Early On Your Marketing Skills
I cannot stress this last skill enough! It’s imperative. It’s important. It’s the make or break of your entire blogging career. It’s… marketing.
You have the content, and you know how to monetize it. Now you need the online visibility to go with it.
The tweet from a well-known brand-building and marketing mind sums this up perfectly.
If you don’t know how to market and get publicity for your blog, you’ll never become successful.
Below are a few marketing avenues that are working really well for bloggers these days.
- Printables on Amazon or Etsy
- Free Email Courses
- Facebook Groups
- YouTube (your own channel and useful comments on other videos)
- TikTok (creating 10-second helpful, informative, amateur videos should not take more than 2 minutes)
- Participating in niche bundles
You want to make sure that people can stumble across your content, and you, in many different ways. Basically, try your best to be wherever your audience currently is.
Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. Be practical. For example, if your audience isn’t much engaged on Instagram – don’t waste your time on that platform.
Select a few that you’ve researched, learn them inside and out, and then expand your visibility and keep expanding it until you and your content (and paid products) are hard to ignore!
But you need to pick a few, master them and then expand your visibility in strategic ways.
Let's Review
If you want to start a blog with the goal of turning it into a full-time income within a year, you need to focus on mastering the following three things:
- creating content that provides value and sells
- creating irresistible paid offers
- creating effective marketing channels to continuously drive traffic
